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According to this website, enabling cgroups in the kernel can boost performances by sharing resources in a better way. In particular, the conclusion states that: 

Nevertheless, with a little trial and error, cgroups can help you improve the efficiency of your systems’ resource usage and avoid downtime due to overusage of a single service.

Kernel seeds, however, recommend to deactivate them altogether. They say:

Consider these [kernel] settings poison. They remain nothing but system slow-downs. They are all off by default [in the proposed kernel config file].

Who should I trust?

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  • Do you have a specific problem where you think cgroups is a proper solution?
    – haimg
    Jun 12, 2012 at 22:26
  • There was a time when SMP support in Linux was considered "poison", too. Jun 12, 2012 at 22:34
  • @haimg not really, but I have read many opposite statements and I am trying to figure out about them
    – qdii
    Jun 12, 2012 at 22:59

1 Answer 1

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I think this is one of those questions where the answer is it depends.

If you think that your system's resource management needs manual intervention, and you're sure you can do a better job than the default schedulers, and you measured the needs and performance of processes and subsystems in question, and your time spent tweaking these is worth less than the cost of hardware upgrade to relieve the resource starvation, than of course, go ahead, use cgroups. It's a wonderful tool, and if you're Google, every little improvement will scale to 100,000 servers, so it's worth to spend time tweaking things.

On the other hand, in my own experience, every single time I thought: ok, this is the time to use cgroups, I ended up doing something else: just using nice/ionice, upgrading the hardware, separating the services into separate virtual or physical machines, etc. cgoups is one of these technologies that look simple, but are quite hard to configure correctly.

To sum up, unless you have a very clear idea why you need it, don't use it, you'll end up with a slower system, not faster.

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